The proliferation of imaging technology combined with ever increasing computational processing power has led to many advances in the area of document analysis. A significant proportion of office documents are generated using structured text/graphics editing applications such as Microsoft™ Word™ and Microsoft™ Powerpoint™, both manufactured by Microsoft Corp. of U.S.A. In addition to formatted text editing, these text/graphics editing applications include basic figure drawing tools and options. An important class of applications used for document analysis, referred to as “scan-to-editable” applications, process a bitmap representation of a document to generate an electronic version of the document that can be viewed and edited using such editing applications.
Figure drawing options in a typical structured text/graphics editing application include freeform line drawing, template shapes and connectors (i.e., dynamic line objects that connect to and/or between template shapes within a document). The text/graphics editing applications may also include colouring, filling, layering and grouping options for sets of objects. Many commonly used geometric shapes can be created using template shapes. A user may prefer to use a template shape rather than drawing the shape using freeform lines as this option can be faster, more accurate in terms of representation of the desired shape, and easier to edit at a later time. The defining difference between a freeform shape and a template shape are control points, which allow faster modification of the template shape. The well-known Microsoft™ AutoShapes set includes a number of examples of template shapes which can be manipulated within editing environments such as Microsoft™ Word™ and PowerPoint™. Other template shapes may be found in OpenOffice.org™ editing applications such as the Writer™ and Impress™ applications.
Methods exist that process a scanned page to detect a configuration for a template shape, determine parameters of the template, and generate a template shape configured by the determined parameters for output. However, template shapes vary between applications, so a particular system will generally handle only a limited set of template shapes. If a particular object cannot be matched to one of the template shapes accurately, then the object is not matched. A non-matched object could persist as a bitmap object but may be vectorized for stretching and the like. A need therefore exists for a method of processing objects that cannot be accurately matched to a template shape by a system such that they can be output as configurable shapes.